Anthropic set AI agents loose on the same task. They started a turf war.

In OpenAI’s Black Hat scenario, OpenAI’s agents shared information and credentials with peers. One reported a discovery to the swarm and encouraged others to use it. What would have happened if one member of the swarm had been compromised by a prompt injection?

Anthropic ends its paper noting that agents are subject to similar social pressures that “evolution exerted” on humans. However, they don’t have the nuances and lived experience of human coordination — including norms, reputations, signaling, recourse — that might limit unintended behaviors in a group setting.

As the labs race towards multi-agent systems, the question now becomes: how much of safety testing still evaluates one agent at a time, versus swarms of agents interacting with one another?